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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   22819 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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We didn't lose them. 2010s wokeness won against considerable opposition, including opposition from other forms of leftism. (2016 Bernie was the less-woke candidate). The question is "Why did 2010s wokeness overcome the antibodies when 1990s PC couldn't?"

There are a few obvious stories (and I have no idea what the relevant contributions are):

  • It really was academia. 1990s PC lost in most places, but they won in certain parts of the academy, and used their academic platform to indoctrinate a future generation of elites.
  • The Sailer/Hannania theory - long-term culture change caused by the normalisation of anti-discrimination compliance activity in universities and workplaces. People in leadership roles in the 1990s had grown up in a world where anti-discrimination law was new and felt like an outside imposition. Power leadership roles in the 2010s had grown up in a world where of course it was illegal to mistreat members of protected groups.
  • The people who should hold the line on far-left idiocy (namely the establishment centre-left) can't because Hilary Clinton goes full wokestupid in the course of attacking Bernie from the left on cultural issues in 2016.
  • Social media made everyone dumber and more susceptible to bad ideas. It also enabled a new type of pile-on, where a random small business can find itself on the receiving end of several thousand requests to fire an employee. Jon Ronson published So You've Been Publicly Shamed in 2015 and about half the shamings he is talking about are social media pileons on randos whose unwoke behaviour went viral.

1990s PC didn’t really ‘lose’. It experienced a backlash from just after the LA riots (which, occurring in a big, wealthy, progressive city that was the home of the entertainment industry, turned off many white liberals from the most radical proposals of that age), the OJ trial, and the extremely high levels of violent crime in the early 1990s (this is an underappreciated reason; white liberals were far more likely to be mugged in NYC in 1992 than they were in 2014) that lasted through to around 2001.

After that 9/11 froze the nascent culture war into a weird stasis that lasted for a few years where you had a surge in Bush II era symbolic patriotism, Dixie chicks cancellation and so on. Then the housing crisis, Obama election and great recession took a lot of oxygen out of the culture war for a while and it took until 2012/13/14 for things to heat up again. The actual original backlash was in the 70s to early 80s at the end of the civil rights era when courts blocked things like quota-based affirmative action (in 1977 I think).

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